Toll of the Campaign: Hillary Clinton Old and Bitchy?

There's been few turns in the debate over Hillary Clinton's campaign the last few days.

Note first this gnarly picture of Hillary Clinton above, which was first published at the Drudge Report. Hillary Clinton's a 61 year-old woman. - why is she looking so haggard and wrinkly here? Is it the toll of the campaign?

Ann Althouse wants to know:

My first reaction to that picture is simple disbelief. How can she suddenly look that much older? I know Presidents age horribly in their few years in office, but she's not President yet, and this seems to have happened overnight. Did some treatment wear off?

But here's my second reaction, on reflection: We make high demands on women. A picture like this of a male candidate would barely register. Fred Thompson always looks this bad, and people seem to think he's handsome. We need to get used to older women and get over the feeling that when women look old they are properly marginalized as "old ladies." If women are to exercise great power, they will come into that power in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We must — if we care about the advancement of women — accommodate our vision and see a face like this as mature, experienced, serious — the way we naturally and normally see men's faces.

Althouse is responding to Immodest Proposals, which called the Hillary mug shot the photographic event of the year:

Right here, that's it, this is the most significant photo taken in the year 2007. Think it will win a Pullitzer? Whichever photog snapped this photo effectively ended Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

There's no recovering from that, image isn't everything, but it counts for a lot, and her image in that photo isn't the image most Americans would want us to project as a nation. You don't have to be wrinkle free to be president, but you can't look haggard and bedraggled, either.

Drudge captioned it "The Toll of the Campaign", but campaigning as arduous as it is, is still nothing compared to the toll that actually serving in the roll these folks hope to fill. Sen. Clinton has had some scary pictures in the past, but none have escaped that looked like this one.

She's done, whether or not the intention of the person behind the lens was to alter the path of the election or not, that's what this snap will do. She may have been too negative, too managed, and too divisive to ever convince the primary voters to choose her. So her winning was far from assured, but just as the "Dean Scream" solidified the concept of Gov. Dean that many voters already had of him, and just pushed away a ton of undecided voters, this photo will turn off the people who were on the fence regarding Hillary.

Rush Limbaugh weighed in on "the toll of the campaign" as well:

Now, this theory of mine based on this Drudge picture of Mrs. Clinton, with the headline: "The Toll of a Campaign." Now, it could well be that that's a sympathy photo, too, to make people feel sorry for how tough the campaign trail is. Now, I want to preface this by saying I know it's going to get out there. Media Matters is going to get hold of this and they're going to take it all out of context. We can expect that. It's a badge of honor when this happens, but for the rest of you, I want you to understand that I am talking about the evolution of American culture here, and not so much Mrs. Clinton. It could be anybody, and it is really not very complicated. Americans are addicted to physical perfection, thanks to Hollywood and thanks to television. We know it because we see it. We see everybody and their uncle in gyms. We see people starving themselves. We see people taking every miracle fad drug there is to lose weight. We see guys trying to get six-pack abs. We have women starving themselves trying to get into size zero and size one clothes; makeovers, facials, plastic surgery, everybody in the world does Botox, and this affects men, too. As you know, the haughty John Kerry Botoxed his wrinkles out during the campaign....

We know that the presidency ages the occupants of that office rapidly. You go back and look at... Well, you can't use Clinton because he dyed his hair based on the audience he was speaking to, but take a look some pictures of Bush in 2000, when he was campaigning, or 2001 when he was inaugurated. Take a look at him now. Just been eight years. The difference is stark. He's kept himself in good shape and so forth, but you can say that this is a sad, unfortunate thing. But men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished. Sadly, it's not that way for women, and they will tell you. (interruption) Well, Snerdley, you're just sitting there thinking I'm on the precipice of the cliff here without a bungee cord. I'm not. I am trying to be... Look, if I'm on the edge of the bungee cord, then I'll take the leap. The bungee cord will save me. I'm just giving an honest assessment here of American culture. Look at all of the evidence. I mean, I've just barely scratched the surface with some of the evidence, and so: Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis? And that woman, by the way, is not going to want to look like she's getting older, because it will impact poll numbers. It will impact perceptions.

Read the whole thing.

While Limbaugh's got a point that we have a simplistic, narcissistic demand for glamor and beauty in our public figures, there's something fishy about that Clinton shot (Photoshopped?).

There's more though: What is it about how we discuss Hillary Clinton? Is the political debate nastier, more demonizing than in earlier eras, perhaps because of greater political polarization?

I thought about this after see this post over at Crooks and Liars, which links to a Bill Moyers interview with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Moyers is hammering on what he alleges is a double standard in the vitriolic attacks in Hillary Clinton as a woman Democratic frontrunner. Try as he might, he can't get Jamieson to go all the way toward fully condemning Hillary Clinton's attackers:

BILL MOYERS: ...You've been looking this year at how the new media, the Internet, the blogs, the Web-- YouTube, MySpace, Facebook-- have been affecting politics. What have you found so far?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, first, there's more information available than there ever has been, and it's more easily retrievable. So we can, within minutes, locate candidates' issue positions, contrast them to other positions, search news interviews with the candidates where they're held accountable for discrepancies between past and current positions. We can get contextual information, also largely gotten from news. And you can hear in the candidates' own voices their arguments for those issue positions, sometimes at great length. Greater than you're going to find in ads. Or greater than you're find-going to find in news....

BILL MOYERS: What is Facebook, for my audience?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Facebook is a place that was originally designed for college students to go and post information about themselves, to talk with each other -- in which groups are formed that post-- people post pictures of themselves and they talk with each other on wall postings. And so you could form a group that would say this is the Bill Moyers discussion group about something on Facebook. And it might have a perfectly fine discussion about anything that we're talking about tonight. Or you could, you know, post a discussion group that says things that I have difficulty even talking with you, even privately much less in public.

BILL MOYERS: Because of the language, the words that are used.

BILL MOYERS: Because of the language, the words that are used.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Because the words and because the graphic images, the images that are manufactured to be placed in these sites are such that you wouldn't want to be associated with them in any way, nor would I. And they contain such things as graphic representations of what a donkey should do to Hillary Clinton. They contain language suggesting various sexual acts in relationship to Hillary Clinton. They reduce Hillary Clinton to various sexual body parts. They engage in characterizations of her in relationship to her policies. They're nothing but name calling in relationship to all of those categories of language. And so if you came home when you were, oh, say, a 15-year-old boy from school. And you said to your mother "Let me give you some of my language for the day," and you repeated any of those words, you know, your mother would have been shocked.

BILL MOYERS: Here are some of the entries from Facebook, you know? "Hillary can't handle one man; how can she handle 150 million of them? Send her back to the kitchen to get a sandwich. She belongs back with the dishes, not upfront with the leaders." It goes on and on like that. I mean, and it is fairly misogynist, but it isn't just the Internet. I mean on Rush Limbaugh, he talks about Clinton's testicle lockbox. MSNBC's Tucker Carlson says there's just something about her that feels castrating. One of his guests, a former spokesman from the Republican National Committee, Clifford May, says that if Clinton is going to appeal to women for support on the basis of her gender, at least call her a vaginal-American. I mean, in fact, isn't the sexist vilification of Hillary Clinton being set by the mainstream media?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: It's being set by both. The mainstream media has a much larger audience. When you look to the size of the groups that have this sort of vulgar, gross language on them about Hillary Clinton, their membership is actually very low. Where mainstream media can reach that number of people with the first second that it's articulated. Underlying this is a long-lived fear of women in politics. For example, we know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle....

--and why we're looking at a laugh and whether it's appropriate or not is of itself an interesting question. We also know that underlying many of these assertions is the assumption that any woman in power will, by necessity, entail emasculating men and, as a result, a statement of fundamental threat.

So, why shouldn't you vote for Hillary Clinton? Well, first, she can't be appropriately a woman and be in power. She must be a man. Hence, the site that says Hillary Clinton can't be the first woman president; Hillary Clinton's actually a man. But also explicit statements that suggest castrating, testicles in lockbox. She's going to emasculate men. It's a zero-sum game in which a woman in power necessarily means that men can't be men.

Okay, note right here how Jamieson indicates that these attacks are from people on the fringe. But here's more:

BILL MOYERS: Let me show the audience that particular-- it's at real time. It happened. Senator McCain was at public meeting. And this woman stood up and asked-- woman. Wasn't a man who asked him this question. Look at it.

WOMAN: How do we beat the bitch

MCCAIN: May I give the translation?

BILL MOYERS: I know people don't like that word. I don't like that word. I'm using it only because it is out there. It's in common discourse on the Internet and you know, Senator McCain had the chance to say, "That's out of bounds. Don't ask me that question. Ask the question you want to ask differently and I'll answer it." But he didn't. He laughed. And he, in effect, gave it legitimacy.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, he looked uncomfortable and then he tried to find a way to reframe it, and he didn't reframe it very artfully. But those first seconds that you're showing on camera, you can see he's not very comfortable in that moment. And I wonder why the national audience didn't see that moment and feel that discomfort and ask the question, "Would you be comfortable saying about the woman who teaches your child, the woman who is your doctor, the woman who heads this corporation, you know, 'Well, how's the bitch doing today?'"

You know, where are the boundaries of when you will use that language and what does it mean? Was this a Hillary-specific comment? Or is this about women who get this far seeking the presidency? Or was this language that has been circulating in private circles for a very long time and now erupted into public? The people have heard it so often that they're not surprised by it? And as a result, they don't think we need to talk about it.

I think one way to reframe this is to ask: How would you ask a comparable question about a male candidate you really wanted to defeat? Where would you find comparable language to use?

BILL MOYERS: And where would you? There is no language of degeneration like this that describes men, is there?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, you could say, "How are we going to beat the bastard?" But it wouldn't carry all the same resonance of that word in the context of its use now.

BILL MOYERS: And you couldn't say, "How are we going to defeat the nigger?" How are we going to-- which is the word that was so common when I was growing up in the South. "How are you going to defeat the kike?" referring to Jews-- you wouldn't do--- that woman would not have done that, I don't think.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, and we have language is constantly open for discussion. We know what's appropriate and what's inappropriate by the way in which society responds, what our peer group responds, the community we turn to responds. And so when someone uses language that is considered inappropriate and there is a national discussion, we dampen down that use. That's what happened with Imus, who is now just coming back on the air. When something like this happens and we don't have the discussion, we move it in to acceptable use.

BILL MOYERS: But some of this stuff on the Internet about Clinton is just downright pornographic. Words are used, toxic words-- are used that I can't use and wouldn't use on the air. I mean, let me just show you some of the stuff we pulled off-- a montage we strung together from the web with using some of the worst comments about them, which would be offensive to people if we didn't bleep them out and still may be offensive. But take a look....

BILL MOYERS: I want to say how would I write this off as just Internet graffiti, the kind of stuff you'd find sometimes on the subway or you found on your high school gym wall. But I have to say it seems to me to have reached far beyond that.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: When you look at the number of members who identify with the sites that post these sorts of things, they're actually fairly small. One question is: How much social disapproval of this actually is there? Another is, within these communities, where is the capacity to talk back and ask where the boundaries of appropriate discourse would be? That is, is there a way to engage productively in the disagreement they want to express and have some substantive content attached instead of simply, you know, ad hominem, in this case I guess ad feminem, name calling?

BILL MOYERS: How does this make you feel as a woman?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I think most of the professional women who see this happening have had enough professional experiences in their lives to realize that these sorts of sentiments are actually out there and have probably experienced some of these sorts of things. And the question it raises for me is, you know, as this happens nationally and as moderate Republican women become more aware of it, do they increase their identification with Hillary Clinton or not?

BILL MOYERS: Which came first, the episode with McCain from the woman who asked him that question or all the pornographic stuff about Hillary Clinton on the Internet?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: The material was on the Internet long before the McCain question. And these kinds of characterizations of Hillary Clinton go back to her emergence in the public sphere as the spouse of the Democratic candidate in 1992.

BILL MOYERS: So this is really unusual?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: It's un-- this amount--

BILL MOYERS: Unprecedented?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: This amount of content is unprecedented. But because the medium of the Internet is new, we don't know what would have happened with previous candidacies of women. So we can't go back and actually study it. The way we find that these kinds of characterizations of Hillary Clinton have been out there is to look to other forms of media throughout the 1990s where we do, indeed, find them. Hillary Clinton as dominatrix, for example, is one of the ongoing themes and one of the parodies on Rush Limbaugh.

BILL MOYERS: We share the same floor here with the BBC. And a BBC producer, I was talking about this with him the other day. He said, you know, this did not happen when Margaret Thatcher rose to power. Of course, the Internet was not a phenomenon then. But it did not happen even in the pubs, it wasn't said about Margaret Thatcher. What's different about the British culture and the American culture?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: What I remember being asked about Margaret Thatcher is who wears the pant in the family? And her husband, you know, basically is suggesting that he did. So a kind of light joking tone about - the question, you know, what is it like to have a female assuming power? But you've got to remember that Britain had a history of female leadership. You know, Elizabeth Rex is, you know, the queen that we all turn back to as, you know, the monarch that is an exemplar of exercise of power, including in times of war. The United States doesn't have a tradition, except an indirect one with Edith Bolling Wilson. And then with very strong first ladies with Rosalyn Carter, with Nancy Reagan, with Hillary Clinton.

BILL MOYERS: I covered the campaign in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was the Democratic vice-presidential running mate. I do not recall these kind of attacks on Geraldine Ferraro. There's something, as you say, unique in this present experience.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Or there's another possibility. There's a possibility that these kinds of attacks have always been there, but they were never posted in public space before. Is it possible that in these past environments, for example, with Margaret Thatcher in Britain or, for example, when women were running for governorships. When, you know, you saw, for example, Jean Kirkpatrick emerge as a Republican leader or Ann Armstrong, earlier than that. Perhaps these things were being said. But perhaps we didn't have any way of seeing them.

Perhaps the comments that you're reprising from public space elsewhere, largely on cable or on talk radio, were actually out there but we only had network evening news as a way of getting access to the political world. And they never would have gotten into that forum. So it's possible that nothing has changed except our access to a window on a part of a world. And that we haven't found a way to create boundaries around it and say within it, "Don't you want to have a different kind of discourse here? Do you really want to conventionalize this?"

Jamieson does not take the bait!

She comes down squarely that the wild, demonizing attacks we see are not something new, or at least it would be impossible to confirm empirically a more substantial courseness in today's political speech than in earlier eras (certainly Margaret Thatcher got some of the nastiest attacks imaginable in her day, from the left!)

So a question for readers: Are Limbaugh or Moyers two sides of the same coin, one conservative and one liberal, both trying to put their own spin on the issues?

I'm mostly just observing. But honestly, I don't think the "toll of the campaign photo" is a matter for serious discussion beyond a morning of talk radio chatter. Of the two, I see Moyers engaging in more of a partisan project, as part of the liberal media elite driving the hard-line discourse among much of the nation's press establishment.

Blaming America for Terrorism?

The Los Angeles Times is currently running a new new editorial series, "American Values and the Next President." While I rarely agree with the paper's editorials, this set of essays is worth a good read.

Yet what really caught my attention was one of this morning's letters to the editor, which was commenting on a previous installment of the series on liberty and American values. The author, J.G. Berinstein, argues the Times is playing it a bit soft:

Your editorial does not go far enough. Part of the reason citizens and Congress have acceded to the unprecedented power grab by the Bush administration is that they have bought into the notion that the U.S. faces a "stateless philosophy" that has drawn it into a "conflict without end."

I submit that the administration's war on terrorism isn't a war at all, and that the best way to reduce the level of terrorism is by altering foreign policy.

The plain truth is that current administration policy provokes terrorism. If its policies were based on respect for the right to self-determination, true freedom of religion and human rights and liberties in general, there would be far less enmity directed toward the United States.

Instead, the administration has arrogantly pursued "preventive war," "regime change," torture, imprisonment without due process and other policies that make the U.S. appear to be an overgrown, immature bully. And no one likes a bully.

Once it refashions its foreign policy in such a way as to demonstrate respect for the rest of the world, (and less of a sense of entitlement to the other countries' resources), the threat of terrorism will fall dramatically.

Well, that's a lot to think about:

Let me see, an "unprecedented" power grab? I'm sure Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt might feel slighted.

"Citizens and Congress" have "bought into the notion that the U.S. faces a 'stateless philosophy' that has drawn it into a 'conflict without end?'" Could that "stateless philosophy" be Islamic fundamentalism, which was the ideological basis for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and I'd bet Berinstein discounts the danger of state-sponsored - but "non-state" - terror movements around the Middle East, notably Hezbollah and Hamas)? A "conflict without end? Was that the Cold War?

What about how the administration "arrogantly pursued preventive war, regime change, torture, imprisonment without due process and other policies that make the U.S. appear to be an overgrown, immature bully?"

Is it "arrogant" to wage a preventive war against a state recognized internationally as a danger to world peace, which had been in violation of over a decade's worth of U.N.-sponsored resolutions mandating full compliance with global disarmament demands? Was it "arrogant" to fulfill the promise of the Clinton administration's "Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998" when we toppled the murderous regime in Baghdad in 2003?

(I think detainee's due process rights were at issue at the Supreme Court recently, but hey, with President Bush in office Berinstein's got no time for the fine points of separation of powers.)

And how will the United States refashion its "foreign policy in such a way as to demonstrate respect for the rest of the world?" By electing a Democrat to the White House in 2008 who will adopt international multilateralism, diplomatic concessionism, and defense downsizing in the face of a worldwide movement of radicals and religious fundamentalists intent on the destruction of this country?

I don't think so, and blaming America first is the last thing we need to do in terms of generating the respect of the rest of the world.

McCain Battles Romney, Giuliani in New Hampshire

This morning's Los Angeles Times has an analysis of the political dynamics of the New Hampshire primary, focusing on John McCain's chances there in the wake of this weekend's big endorsements:

In an increasingly fractured Republican race, three top presidential hopefuls fanned out across New Hampshire on Monday, with Mitt Romney seeking to downplay expectations, John McCain basking in key endorsements and Rudolph W. Giuliani pressing his case to siphon votes from Romney, the leader here.

McCain was joined at his first stop by Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate turned independent, who officially endorsed the Arizona senator Monday.

McCain's campaign hopes the endorsement will broaden his appeal to independent voters, who can register to vote on election day in either primary. Such voters helped boost McCain to an 18-point victory here over George W. Bush in 2000.

He received the backing over the weekend of New Hampshire's Portsmouth Herald, the Boston Globe and the Des Moines Register, although he has placed less emphasis on Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses.

With his efforts heavily concentrated on New Hampshire, where ballots will be cast five days later, McCain has managed to rebuild some support after hitting a low this summer when his once-dominant campaign sank to fourth place in the state behind Romney, Giuliani and former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee.

Many core Republican voters here were turned off by his push for legislation that would have created a path to citizenship for some of the nation's more than 12 million illegal immigrants. But McCain has since explained to voters, as he did in Concord on Monday night, that he moved too hastily on those plans without first making sure the borders were secure.

Some think that revised message and positive headlines about the "surge" in Iraq, which he backed, are helping draw voters into his camp.

Though McCain is jockeying with Giuliani for second place here, some 10 points behind Romney, few political analysts are discounting the possibility of a McCain resurgence.

"This is where the Iowa factor, the electability factor, comes in," said Andrew E. Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. "If Romney gets beaten in Iowa, the perception of him as being an electable candidate is going to drop."

Despite his lead in New Hampshire, Romney suggested that even a second-place finish here would not mark the end of his campaign.

After he noted that Bill Clinton had finished second here in 1992, Romney said at a Londonderry news conference: "The political wins, and the implication of them, is something I'll leave to others. But typically one says coming out of Iowa there are three tickets and coming out of New Hampshire there are a couple of tickets, and I'm hoping to pull a ticket from both of those states, at least."

Romney's remarks underscored the building pressure on his campaign and the unpredictability of the New Hampshire contest, where more than 40% of likely Republican voters have yet to make up their minds.

The article also discusses Mike Huckabee's fortunes, and then concludes with a mention of Rudy Giuliani's recent campaign stop at Goss International, a New Hampshire-based manufacturing firm. Some in the crowd weren't happy with Giuliani's response to his support for gun control as Mayor of New York:

Richard D. Wamsley, 57, Goss' director of engineering, said afterward that he was disappointed by those answers.

He thought Giuliani seemed unfocused and tended "to drift."

"I expect somebody who is going to be in a position of power like the president to be very clear-thinking," said Wamsley, who came to the meeting undecided between Giuliani and McCain and departed leaning toward McCain.

"More than anything else," Wamsley said of McCain, "it's his background. He is a true hero. I think what Giuliani did and how he behaved during the 9/11 crisis was commendable, but I am not sure he did anything out of the ordinary."

Well, perhaps McCain's looking more solid in the Granite State after all!

See my earlier posts on the McCain campaign, and his comeback, here, here, here, here , and here.

Can McCain Win New Hampshire Swing Voters?

One of the assumptions underlying John McCain's purported electability in New Hampshire is the role of political independents, who can swing to one side or the other in the primaries, prividing the pivotal votes needed for victory.

How will the swing vote play out in January? The Washington Post has the analysis:

As Sen. John McCain, a Republican running for president, touted the endorsement Monday of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a maverick Democrat-turned-independent, it seemed designed to capture a legendary brand of New Hampshirite, a state icon on par with the moose: the independent voter.

New Hampshire law allows people who are registered as "undeclared" to vote in either party's contest in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. That has led political strategists to speak respectfully of the swing voters who wait until the last minute to decide which party's primary to vote in, thereby exerting an outsized, and unpredictable, effect on the outcome.

Such voters are expected to make up at least a quarter of the vote on Jan. 8, and all the candidates are in hot pursuit. McCain (Ariz.) is touting his appeal among centrists such as Lieberman (Conn.). Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is offering his mix of social moderation, fiscal conservatism and hawkish anti-terrorism rhetoric. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is promoting his reach across the political divide, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) argues that there is nothing more independent on offer than his grass-roots libertarian crusade.

Yet the battle for the independents is taking on a new aspect this year, with implications for both parties' primaries: There are signs that the true swing voter, trying to make up his mind between parties, is much less in play.

Political scientists studying the state have noted in recent years that most of its undeclared voters favor one party, with a slight majority now leaning Democratic, and are thus independent in name only. While a growing share of the state's voters are undeclared -- 44 percent -- at most a third of those voters are seen as true independents.

"A lot of these independents are people who have a leaning, but are typical Yankees who don't want to be identified with any party. Who knows -- maybe they think that they'll get less appeals for money that way? But the bottom line is that they either lean Republican or lean Democratic," said Steve Duprey, a former state Republican chairman who is advising McCain here.

The partisan cast of the undeclared is being borne out even more this election season because of the polarizing effects of the Iraq war and President Bush's tenure in general, both of which are unpopular with the state's unaffiliated voters. In 2000, McCain, running as an anti-establishment reformer, vied with Bill Bradley, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey, for the affections of New Hampshire independents -- a battle McCain won, and one that probably cost Bradley an upset win over Al Gore.

This time, there is far less evidence of a direct battle for independents between McCain (or Giuliani) and Obama, the Democratic candidate who is appealing to many of the same voters that Bradley did. There is a gulf between the platforms being offered by McCain and Giuliani on the one hand, and Obama on the other, that is unlike anything that existed between McCain and Bradley.

McCain and Giuliani vow to stay the course in Iraq; Obama cites his early opposition to the war. McCain is relying heavily on the support of older veterans, while Obama is going after the youth vote. Obama is proposing a large expansion of health insurance, but Giuliani mocks such plans as socialistic.

Many independents who voted for McCain in 2000 or considered it say doing so in January is out of the question because of his staunch support of the war.

"I think George Bush has been simply horrible . . . and I'm afraid that Mr. McCain just doesn't see the direction the country is going in," said Bill Nostrom, a retired dairy farmer from Newmarket. He voted for McCain in 2000 but is planning to vote for Obama.

McCain's weakening hold on independents holds enormous potential for Obama. In opinion polls done by the University of New Hampshire this year, 55 to 70 percent of undeclared voters said they would vote in the Democratic primary. (In 2000, 62 percent of independents who voted did so in the GOP primary.) A few months ago, there was little sign that Obama was taking advantage, as polls showed him doing no better among undeclared voters intending to vote Democratic than he was among registered Democrats.

But in last week's UNH survey, he showed gains among undeclared voters intending to vote in the Democratic primary, with 36 percent saying they would vote for him and 26 percent saying they would vote for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), putting him in a tie with her overall. Obama's advisers here say it simply took a little longer for independent voters to move to him than it did for them to rally around Bradley in 2000, because Obama is newer to the political scene.

"Voters did not know who Barack Obama was. Barack Obama was someone they had to learn about," said Jim Demers, a Concord lobbyist who is co-chairing Obama's campaign here.

The McCain campaign does not dispute that it is pursuing a more limited universe of New Hampshire independents than in 2000. Advisers say the campaign is still targeting independents more than it is establishment Republicans, with an effort that includes a television advertisement showing McCain speaking directly to the camera about the special interests and establishment Republicans he has aggravated over the years. But this time, advisers say, McCain is competing less for undeclared voters who are also considering voting for a Democrat than going after undeclared voters who would vote in the GOP primary no matter what.

Lieberman's endorsement, they said, helps in that regard, drawing Republican-leaning independents who admire his resolve on the war, as well as establishment Republicans who perhaps see in his endorsement proof that McCain would be electable next fall. But there is little illusion that the support of Lieberman, who draws the scorn of many Democrats, will win over independents interested in Obama.

"There's going to be a good percentage of independents who historically take the Republican ballot and don't care about Barack or Hillary, and we want their votes, and this is a great way to solidify that," said Duprey, the McCain adviser.

The lack of direct competition between the Obama and McCain campaigns is clear in the contrast between their appearances here. In a recent visit, Obama presided over a panel discussion with his foreign policy advisers before about 120 voters in Portsmouth. In it, he laid out his plans for using diplomacy to reengage America with the rest of the world.

McCain, by contrast, has adopted a much more muscular tone than he did in 2000, with a martial campaign logo, a video highlighting his military heroism played for crowds at his appearances, and a heavy emphasis on his support of the Iraq war. At most appearances, McCain asks veterans in the crowd to stand to be applauded, and questions regarding veterans' issues -- and inside jokes between McCain and veterans -- dominate his events more than they did in 2000. In Bedford, McCain dismissed a question by a young woman who cited poll numbers showing that a majority of military families question the war, telling her: "I know the military, and I know that by the thousands they categorically reject that assertion."

While the approach may have a narrower appeal than McCain's reform platform of 2000, it has solidified his support among some core Republican-leaning independent backers, such as Ed McCabe, a landlord and Army reservist who has served in Iraq.

"A lot of us were with McCain last time, and a lot of those same people want to be able to say 'I was right last time' " by backing McCain again now, he said.

The polling data provided here's not to be fully trusted. There's no breakdown in support for those who are likely to vote in the GOP primary. How many of those voters will go for McCain? He's going to need their support.

There's bound to be lots more guys like Ed McCabe, the Army reservist quoted above. Go McCain!

See my earlier McCain posts, here, here, here, and here - and don't forget this one, "McCain Deserves a Second Look."

More McCain: Why the Comeback?

I'm very pleased that John McCain is getting the attention he deserves as the one to beat for the GOP presidential nomination. The Wall Street Journal explains why the Arizona Senator's making a comeback:

Endorsing John McCain for President yesterday, Joseph Lieberman stressed that his Senate colleague would always elevate his country above his party. Coming from a man who was excommunicated by Democrats for his views on Iraq, this was a fitting sentiment--and it may also explain why Mr. McCain seems to be staging something of a primary resurgence.

As recently as January, Mr. McCain was the putative Republican favorite, but his support collapsed amid his campaign mismanagement and the GOP's immigration meltdown. Now primary voters seem prepared to give him a second look in an unstable race. Mike Huckabee has galloped to a lead in Iowa, bruising Mitt Romney, though without much scrutiny of the former Arkansas Governor's record. Fred Thompson has yet to offer a compelling rationale for his candidacy. Rudy Giuliani for a time defied political gravity based on his New York reform leadership, but he has been hurt by questions about his judgment and ethics.

Re-enter Mr. McCain, who is nothing if not a known GOP commodity. One of his problems has been that to some Republicans he is too well known. This is the John McCain who was adored by the media for opposing tax cuts, favoring limits on free speech as part of "campaign finance reform," and embracing a cap and trade regime for global warming. This is the John McCain who was also endorsed this weekend by the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe, two liberal papers that are sure to endorse a Democrat next year.

Our own differences with Mr. McCain have mainly been over economics, and especially taxes. Despite record surpluses in 2000, the Senator refused to propose tax cuts as part of his Presidential bid--one reason he lost to George W. Bush. He also opposed the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, often using the language of the left.

Mr. McCain paid a visit to our offices last Friday, and he now says he supports extending the Bush tax rates, even admitting they helped the economy emerge from recession. "Without a doubt. Without the slightest doubt," he told us. "Absolutely."

In a spirited exchange, Mr. McCain justified his previous opposition by arguing that there was no discipline on spending. "To the everlasting shame and embarrassment of the Republican Party and this Administration," he noted, "we went on a spending spree and we didn't pay for it." That's true enough, and in an ideal world tax cuts would be offset dollar-for-dollar by spending cuts.

But in practice Congress will never do so, which means Republicans are left to be tax collectors for the welfare state. The experience of the Reagan and Bush years is that tax cutting has its own economic benefits, and that revenues will rebound far more quickly than the critics claim. We asked Mr. McCain what he'd do when faced with a Democratic Congress that insists he raise taxes in 2009, and he replied that he'd say "No" and cite JFK's successful tax-cutting in the 1960s. This is intellectual progress, and we trust such McCain advisers as Phil Gramm and Tim Muris will conduct further tutorials.

More than economics, Mr. McCain has two main strengths in this GOP race: His record on national security, and the belief that he can reach enough non-Republicans to assemble a viable center-right coalition and defeat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in what could be a difficult GOP year. Mr. Lieberman's endorsement is notable because it reinforces both of those claims. Mr. Lieberman had to win GOP and independent voters to keep his Connecticut Senate seat after he lost the Democratic primary, and Mr. McCain won in New Hampshire in 2000 with the help of independents who could vote in the GOP primary. He'll need their support again this year.

The two men have also been stalwarts on Iraq, even when it became unpopular, and despite paying a political price for it. Mr. McCain also argued persuasively for the changes in strategy now known as the surge. In his Friday visit with us, the Senator spoke with authority on all manner of foreign policy. He is a hawk in the Reagan mold on Iran, the larger Middle East and overall defense spending.

Our guess is that this national security record is the main reason for his own political surge. With the success of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, even some conservatives have taken to arguing that foreign and military policy will become less important in 2008. We doubt it. This is still a post-9/11 country, and voters know they will be electing a Commander in Chief in a world that is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War. In an election against any Democrat next year, Mr. McCain would have little trouble winning the security debate.

See also some of my earlier McCain posts here, here, here, and here.

**********

UPDATE: Captain Ed weighs-in on the McCain comeback:

In a strange way, the elements of the primary campaign have conspired to give McCain a second shot at the nomination. He fixed his campaign problems in time to maintain his national standing as a candidate. Meanwhile, while Republicans still have issues with his policies and track record, the same can be said about all of his competitors. Critics have lambasted Huckabee's record in Arkansas, dinging his momentum, while the conservative base has continued to have issues with Giuliani's pro-choice social centrism. Romney has tried to overcome policy shifts and past rhetoric, but still has not quite built trust with the voters.

Can McCain take advantage of that? He has admitted error on two key positions that generated considerable ire among Republicans: tax cuts and immigration. His position on cuts now unreservedly recognizes the economic boost that Bush's reductions created, and says he will defend them as President. That's at least as believable as Romney's reversal on abortion, although a President has a much greater effect on taxes than on abortion, making it pragmatically much more critical.

On immigration, the sale will almost certainly not succeed. As late as this summer, McCain tried forcing through a reform package that infuriated conservatives. He now says that he "heard the message" and will pursue border security first before turning his attention to the status of illegal immigrants. Had he done that this summer, he may have found some credibility -- but that opportunity has passed. The same is true with campaign-finance reform, where some conservatives and liberals find agreement that the effect has been to curtail political speech and not corruption. In this case, McCain remains politely defiant.

McCain has been magnificent on the war and on spending. He has bucked his own party on what turned out to be a poor strategy in post-war Iraq and fought hard for the White House when they finally took his advice. For porkbusting, one could not find a better candidate, one who has already fought in the trenches against the thinly-veiled bribery system that has gripped Congress.

Those qualities have rightly kept him in contention -- but will they be enough for him to prevail? Only if Republican voters decide that the other top-tier candidates have more negatives than McCain. If GOP voters perceive him as the most reliable conservative, one who can hold the Republican big tent together, he has a fighting chance. Unfortunately, McCain's record as a "maverick" will make that conclusion very difficult to reach.

Only if the "other top-tier candidates have more negatives than McCain?"

Perhaps, although maybe McCain's record as a straight-talker should be taken into consideration now. If he says he's seen the light on immigration, he's not one to pull your leg.

In any case, The Griper made similar arguments about McCain's maverick streak. The whole debate's showing exactly what a political campaign should be all about: evaluating the candidates and sizing up the most qualified.

McCain Endorsements Piling Up

Senator Joseph Lieberman has endorsed John McCain for president:

This morning in New Hampshire, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) endorsed
John McCain for President of the United States. Senator Lieberman issued the following statement on his endorsement:

"I have come to New Hampshire this morning to ask Republican and Independent voters to support John McCain in the first-in-the-nation primary on January 8.

"I know that it is unusual for someone who is not a Republican to endorse a Republican candidate for President. And if this were an ordinary time and an ordinary election, I probably would not be here today. But this is no ordinary time - and this is no ordinary election -- and John McCain is no ordinary candidate.

"In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great, the threats we face too real, and the opportunities we have too exciting for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.

"We desperately need our next President to break through the reflexive partisanship that is poisoning our politics and stopping us from getting things done. We need a President who can reunite our country, restore faith in our government, and rebuild confidence in America's future.

"My friend John McCain is that candidate, and that is why I am so proud to be standing by his side today. "I have worked closely with John for many years on many issues -- from stopping genocide in the Balkans to combating global warming to creating the 9/11 Commission and enacting its recommendations into law. I have seen John, time and again, rise above the negativism and smallness of our politics to get things done for this country we love so much. I have watched him, time and again, work across party lines to make our country safer and stronger.

"John McCain has proven that we can trust him to do what is right for our country, not only when it is easy, but when it is hard; to do what is necessary, not only when it is popular, but when it is not; and to tell us the truth, not only when it is easy to hear, but when it is not. "As President, John McCain will bring America together again. He will inspire a new American unity and a new American patriotism. He will push all of us to work together to solve our biggest problems, and defeat our most dangerous enemies.

"Throughout our history, succeeding generations of brave Americans have risked their lives for the cause of freedom - which is America's cause. Throughout his career, from the ranks of the military to halls of the Congress, John McCain has made freedom's cause his own. He learned the ideals of patriotism and service from his father, he taught them to his sons, and he will hold those ideals high as an inspiration for all Americans.

"When it comes to keeping America safe in this time of war, John has proven that he has the experience, the strength, and the character, to be our commander-in-chief from day one. I have traveled the world with John, so I can tell you how much he is liked and admired by leaders across the globe. He will be a President our friends will respect and our enemies will fear, and a President who will lead our nation on the world stage with purpose and principle.

"When others were silent, and it was thought politically unpopular, John had the courage and common sense to sound the alarm about the mistakes we were making in Iraq and to call for more troops and a new strategy there. And when others waivered, when others wanted to retreat from the field of battle, John had the courage and the common sense to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge in Iraq, where we are at last winning.

"You may not agree with John McCain on every issue, but you can always count on him to be honest with you about where he stands, you can always count on him to stand for what he believes is right for our country -- regardless of pressure from politicians or vested interests. And you can count on him to be restless in pursuit of progress. In that sense, John McCain is the real change candidate in this race for the Presidency.

"There are many fine people running for President. Many of them are good friends of mine. But I have concluded -- and I hope you will, as well -- that John McCain is the candidate who can best reunite our country and lead us to victory in the war against Islamist terrorism.

"The nomination for President remains wide open, so on January 8th, New Hampshire's voters can - and I hope will - make history and send John McCain from the Granite State to victory.

See also the New York Times for an analysis of the politics of pre-primary endorsements.

Civilian Casualties in Iraq: The Hidden War?

War is hell, right?

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

How many Americans appreciate this, especially in the time of an all-volunteer Army, and amid the increasing deligitimization of warfare as a tool of statecraft among the antwar left?

These ruminations arise upon reading Michael Massing's," Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs," in the current New York Review of Books. Massing focuses on the dark side of our current conflict. He reviews new works on the war, written from what he sees as a richer, more personal perspective than what's been available in most newspapers and books:

As probing and aggressive as the reporting from Iraq has been, it is subject to many filters. There are, for example, "family viewing" standards that make it difficult for journalists to write frankly about such sensitive aspects of military life as the profane language soldiers often use. It's also hard for journalists to get an accurate sense of what soldiers really think. Through embedding, reporters have enjoyed remarkable physical access to the troops, but learning about their true feelings is far more difficult, all the more so since soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Finally, there are limitations imposed by the political climate in which the press works. Images that seem too graphic or unsettling can cause an uproar. When, for instance, The New York Times in January 2007 ran a photo of a US soldier lying mortally wounded on the ground, the paper was angrily accused of showing disrespect for the troops. More generally, the conduct of US soldiers in the field remains a highly sensitive subject. News organizations that show soldiers in a bad light run the risk of being labeled anti-American, unpatriotic, or—worst of all—"against the troops." In July, for instance, when The New Republic ran a column by a private that recounted several instances of bad behavior by US soldiers, he and the magazine were viciously attacked by conservative bloggers. Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name, and this serves as a powerful deterrent to editors and producers.

Books are less susceptible to such pressure and as a result can be far more pointed. The picture they present is not always bleak. They describe many affecting scenes in which soldiers try to do good, administering first aid, handing out food, arranging for garbage to be picked up. For the most part, the GIs come across as well-meaning Americans who have been set down in an alien environment with inappropriate training, minimal cultural preparation, and no language skills. Surrounded by people who for the most part wish them ill and living with the daily fear of being blown up, they frequently take out their frustrations on the local population. It's in these firsthand accounts that one can find the most searing descriptions of the toll the war has taken on both US troops and the Iraqi people.

Massing's main attention is on two books: One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick, and Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, by Evan Wright.

Here's another passage, focusing on civilian casualties in the war:

Taken together, Fick and Wright provide a chilling account of what it was like to be in Baghdad as the city descended into anarchy. A stream of terrified and desperate Iraqis shows up at a cigarette factory the Marines are occupying, begging them to put an end to the looting, but the soldiers feel powerless. At night, the gunfire in the streets becomes so fierce that they don't dare venture out. By this point, Fick has learned that the seemingly reckless way in which his men had been deployed was actually part of a bold Marine plan to attract the fire of Iraqis and distract them from the main invasion force thrusting into Iraq much farther to the west. The plan succeeded, but this seems of little consolation in light of the lawlessness sweeping Baghdad. Fick, Wright observes, "appears to have lost his belief in his mission here." The cause is not so much the disorder itself as his realization that the Americans have no real plan to remedy it.

As Wright's time with the platoon nears an end, he looks back on all that he has seen:

In the past six weeks, I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from aircraft.

Wright leaves it at that. By this point in his book, the death of civilians has emerged as a major theme, and I was sorry he didn't discuss the matter further. To learn more, I contacted Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. (During the invasion, he worked at the Pentagon, recommending targets for air strikes.) Garlasco told me that, according to the most widely accepted estimates, 10,000 civilians at a minimum were killed during the invasion, the large majority victims of the coalition. Few Americans seem aware of this number.

Wright did elaborate on this in an interview he gave soon after his book appeared. "For the past decade," he said,

we've been steeped in the lore of The Greatest Generation, the title of Tom Brokaw's book about the men who fought World War II, and a lot of people have developed this romanticism about that war. They tend to remember it from the Life magazine images of the sailor coming home and kissing his fiancée. They've forgotten that war is about killing. I really think it's important as a society to be reminded of this, because you now have a generation of baby boomers, a lot of whom didn't serve in Viet Nam. Many of them protested it. But now they're grown up, and as they've gotten older I think many of them have grown tired of the ambiguities and the lack of moral clarity of Viet Nam, and they've started to cling to this myth of World War II, the good war.

I never read Tom Brokaw's book, but if you go back and look at the actual greatest generation writers, people like Kurt Vonnegut—who wrote Slaughterhouse Five—and Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and their contemporaries, who actually fought in World War II and wrote about it, there's no romance at all. In fact, a lot of their work is very anti-war.

His book, Wright added, "goes into how soldiers kill civilians, they wound civilians." In Iraq, the shooting of civilians

was justified in the sense that there were some civilian buses that had Fedayeen fighters in them.... But when you see a little girl in pretty clothes that someone dressed her in, and she's smushed on the road with her legs cut off, you don't think, well you know there were Fedayeen nearby and this is collateral damage.

Overall, Wright said, "the problem with American society is we don't really understand what war is." The view Americans get "is too sanitized."

Just how sanitized is the American view of the war? Notice Massing's theme, that the American public is shielded from Iraq's brutality.

Certainly the public cannot fathom the fog of war, the blood and guts, the true human toll, on all sides, and obviously, the real grunt's eye-view of combat isn't appropriate for family-hour television viewing.

I don't think, however, that the public is systematically deprived of coverage of the war's horrors. Indeed, one could argue the opposite, that the American media has been obssessed with civilian deaths in its war reporting, and on the alleged atrocities committed by American service-personnel.

I'm reminded here some recent scholarship on civilian casualties in Iraq by Colin Kahl, who writes:

Based on field research and an extensive review of primary and secondary materials, I contend that the U.S. military has done a better job of respecting noncombatant immunity in Iraq than is commonly thought. Moreover, compliance has improved over time as the military has adjusted its behavior in response to real and perceived violations of the norm. This behavior is best explained by the internalization of noncombatant immunity within the U.S. military’s organizational culture, especially since the Vietnam War. Contemporary U.S. military culture is characterized by what I call the “annihilationrestraint paradox”: a commitment to the use of overwhelming but lawful force. The restraint portion explains relatively high levels of U.S. compliance with noncombatant immunity in Iraq, while the tension between annihilation and restraint helps account for instances of noncompliance and the overall level of Iraqi civilian casualties resulting from U.S. operations—which, although low by historical standards, have still probably been higher than was militarily necessary, desirable, or inevitable.

Kahl's research is scrupulously non-partisan, and in personal communications with me he wrote this:

...although the number of casualties caused by the *direct* action of U.S. is relatively low by historical standards, we should not trivialize the fact that 8,000-15,000 Iraqis have still died at their hands, and the failure of the U.S. to plan, prepare, and execute a strategy to bring stability to Iraq in the aftermath of regime change contributed to the anarchy and chaos that has claimed perhaps as many as 100,000 additional lives.

I think this is probably a more productive way to look at the problem of civilian casualties.

There are costs in war and conflict, military and civilian. But it's important to put things in context. While it's true to some extent that, "Most Americans simply do not want to know too much about the acts being carried out in their name," it's also probably true that Americans don't like to watch sausage being made. People still eat sausage, of course. Just as there's balance in diet, there should be a balance in how we perceive the costs and benefits of this nation's wars.

Articles like Massing's - and the books he reviews - can help us appreciate the human toll in war. Still, the literary project covered in this article is interested in much more than fostering fuller appreciation of battle. Left-wing journalistic attention to the purported "hidden human costs of war" is part of the broader deligitmization campaign to demonize the use of American military power.

Des Moines Register Backs John McCain!

Well, no sooner than posting my last entry on the Boston Globe's endorsement of John McCain for the GOP nomintion, I've found another (via Memeorandum):

The Des Moines Register has endorsed McCain as the Republican Party standard-bearer in 2008:

The leading candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president present an intriguing mix of priorities, personalities and life stories.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani inspired the city and nation with his confident leadership after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister from Arkansas, charms with homespun humor. Mitt Romney, the multimillionaire investment adviser from Massachusetts, exudes
executive discipline. As governors, both worked across the party divide to improve education and health care in their states.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee brings an actor’s ease to his no-nonsense calls for a return to fiscal discipline.

Yet, for all their accomplishments on smaller stages, none can offer the tested leadership, in matters foreign and domestic, of Sen. John McCain of Arizona. McCain is most ready to lead America in a complex and dangerous world and to rebuild trust at home and abroad by inspiring confidence in his leadership.

In an era of instant celebrity, we sometimes forget the real heroes in our midst. The defining chapter of McCain’s life came 40 years ago as a naval aviator, when he was shot down over Vietnam. The crash broke both arms and a leg. When first seeing him, a fellow prisoner recalls thinking he wouldn’t live the night. He was beaten and kept in solitary confinement, held 5 years. He could have talked. He did not. Son of a prominent Navy admiral, he could have gained early release. He refused.

The one-time playboy emerged from prison a changed, more serious man. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982 and the Senate in 1986, he has built an unconventional political career by taking stands based on principle, not party dogma, and frequently pursuing bipartisanship.

His first term was touched by scandal when the Senate rebuked him for meeting with savings-and-loan regulators on behalf of campaign donor Charles Keating Jr., who was later imprisoned. That ordeal steered him into championing government transparency and battling alongside Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold for the campaign-finance-reform bill that bears their names.

Time after time, McCain has stuck to his beliefs in the face of opposition from other elected leaders and the public. He has criticized crop and ethanol subsidies during two presidential campaigns in Iowa. He bucked his party and president by opposing the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. A year ago, in the face of growing criticism, he staunchly supported President Bush’s decision to increase troop strength in Iraq.

In this campaign, he continues to support comprehensive immigration reform — while watching his poll standings plunge. Some other Republican candidates refuse to acknowledge that climate change is a serious threat caused by human activity. McCain has worked on the issue for seven years and sponsored bills to limit greenhouse-gas emissions.

McCain would enter the White House with deep knowledge of national-security and foreign-policy issues. He knows war, something we believe would make him reluctant to start one. He’s also a fierce defender of civil liberties. As a survivor of torture, he has stood resolutely against it. He pledges to start rebuilding America’s image abroad by closing the Guantanamo prison and beginning judicial proceedings for detainees.

McCain has his flaws, too, of course. He can be hot-tempered, a trait that’s not helpful in conducting diplomacy. At 71, his age is a concern. The editorial board disagrees with him on a host of issues, especially his opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage. McCain foresees a “long, hard and difficult” deployment of troops in Iraq. The Register’s board has called for withdrawal as soon as it’s safely possible.

But with McCain, Americans would know what they’re getting. He doesn’t parse words. And on tough calls, he usually lands on the side of goodness — of compassion for illegal immigrants, of concern for the environment for future generations.

The force of John McCain’s moral authority could go a long way toward restoring Americans’ trust in government and inspiring new generations to believe in the goodness and greatness of America.

That's a fair assessment, and much better said than the Boston Globe's endorsement.

It remains to be seen how much effect all this editorial backing will have on McCain's fortunes. It certainly can't hurt to trumpet three leading state newspaper endorsements in the weeks remaining before the crucial first caucuses and primaries.

See my earlier McCain endorsement posts, here, here, and here.

Another Endorsement for John McCain!

The Boston Globe has endorsed John McCain:

CONVENTIONAL wisdom among political handlers used to hold that a candidate needed to capture the political center. The last two presidential campaigns proved that wrong. The Republicans scraped out victories by pressing just enough buttons and mobilizing just enough voters. But such wins breed political polarization and deprive a president of the political capital needed to ask Americans to sacrifice in difficult times.

The antidote to such a toxic political approach is John McCain. The iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense. The Globe endorses his bid in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

McCain is a conservative whose views differ from those of this editorial page in a variety of ways. He opposes abortion rights. At least in the current election cycle, he has shown no particular quarrel with his party's knee-jerk view of tax cuts as the cure to the nation's economic problems.

Also unlike this page, McCain has strongly supported the current war in Iraq, including the troop surge. Yet the Arizona senator has never been an uncritical booster of President Bush's policies. Early on, he accurately predicted that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn't sending enough troops to maintain order after Saddam Hussein fell. Today, he straightforwardly acknowledges the fragility of the Iraqi government and the corruption that pervades that country. He understands that US failures in Iraq, along with President Bush's torpid response to Hurricane Katrina, have damaged the nation's credibility abroad and at home.

McCain's honesty has served him well on other issues. As a longtime public official from a border state, he recognizes that illegal immigration is a complex problem - for which better border control is only part of the solution. His thoughtful stance may be a tough sell politically at a time when many Republicans (and many Democrats) are anxious about the number of people living and working in the United States illegally. But his opponents' get-tough poses are unlikely to close the gap between immigration law and immigration practice; McCain's comprehensive approach is far more likely to bring the two back in line.

One of McCain's great virtues is his willingness to acknowledge unpleasant realities. McCain sees that special interests with money to throw around have an undue influence over the electoral process and public policy, that the planet is getting warmer because of human activities, that interrogating a suspect by pretending to drown him is a form of torture. To the consternation of many of his fellow Republicans, McCain has pushed for serious reform legislation in all three areas.

In 2000, McCain's insurgent candidacy almost succeeded in stopping the George W. Bush juggernaut. This time around, McCain is running further back in the pack of candidates. Yet Republican voters in New Hampshire would be wise to consider this: Of all the party's candidates, McCain has the greatest potential appeal to independent voters.

The Arizona senator is running for president at a treacherous time. Iraq is in flames. The economy is weak. American voters are worried about their futures, and about their government's ability to enforce its own laws. A general election campaign with John McCain in it is more likely to turn on substance, not demagoguery.

As a lawmaker and as a candidate, McCain has done more than his share to transcend partisanship and promote an honest discussion of the problems facing the United States. He deserves the opportunity to represent his party in November's election.

See also my earlier entries on McCain endorsements, from Lexington at The Economist and the New Hampshire Union-Leader.

Hillary Clinton Losing Her Inevitability

Today's Los Angeles Times offers an excellent analysis of the collapse of Hillary Clinton's inevitability as the eventual Democratic nominee:

She was a disciplined candidate atop a polished campaign, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is now mired in the most serious crisis of her 11-month bid for the White House, as a rolling series of missteps threatens to topple her as the Democratic front-runner.

The large crowds that once came to see her have thinned. Trusted campaign surrogates have veered wildly off message. And a campaign operation that had built seemingly impregnable leads over the summer appears to be faltering, prompting former President Clinton to amp up his role as a public spokesman and campaign advisor.

Clinton's chief rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, has wiped out her lead in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to some polls. Should she lose those contests, gone would be the notion that she is the party's inevitable nominee -- one basis of her appeal as a candidate....

In Hillaryland, as her team calls itself, the message is that there is no cause for worry.

"Politics now is a 24/7 cycle. You go up, you go down," Clinton told reporters in Iowa on Friday. "I think that's all part of a vigorous, dynamic election cycle"....

More and more, her message is being overwhelmed by unforeseen events.

On Thursday morning, she had to apologize to Obama on the tarmac of Reagan National Airport as they were leaving for a Democratic debate. At issue were the remarks of a New Hampshire campaign advisor, Bill Shaheen, who made public his concerns about Obama's drug use in his youth. Shaheen quit the Clinton campaign later in the day.

The episode followed two instances of volunteer aides to the Clinton campaign forwarding e-mails that falsely claimed Obama was a Muslim, possibly intent on destroying the United States. Both of the aides resigned.

Just as confounding to some was Clinton's own attack on Obama's character. As recently as last month, she had said at a dinner for Democratic activists in Des Moines that she was "not interested in attacking" her opponents.

On Dec. 2, she stood before reporters in Cedar Rapids and did just that. She accused Obama of hypocrisy by preaching ethics and then "skirting" campaign finance rules in the way he doles out funds.

Her campaign released a statement the same day that was instantly mocked. Eager to rebut Obama's assertion that the presidency had not been a consuming ambition in his life, the Clinton campaign cited, among other things, an essay he had written in kindergarten titled, "I Want to Become President."

The ploy boomeranged. Embarrassed by pointing to an opponent's childhood writing, the Clinton campaign said it had been joking. But the news release was still on her website, with nothing to indicate that the reference was not serious.

For much of the campaign, Clinton delivered a positive message that seemed to be resonating. Trouble began with her subpar performance at an Oct. 30 debate in Philadelphia, when she waffled on several questions -- among them whether she favored driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Her rivals, sensing an opening, became more aggressive.

Read the whole thing.

I don't have too much to add, except to say that I wouldn't remotely count her out, not even from winning Iowa and New Hampshire.

If any candidacy ever had inevitability, it's Clinton's. While the article reports that recent crowds at Clinton events have been sparse, the decline in interest could be explained by media saturation just as well as a real drop-off in support. The fact is Clinton's made mistakes, as the passages highlighted here show. Plus, Bill Clinton's a huge asset, and he's yet to be really skillfully deployed by the Hillary operation. Not only that, attacks ads work, so while negativity has backfired so far for Clinton, a really shrewed set of hit pieces could cause some lasting damage. A couple of nasty outside interest group "issue advocacy" ads against Obama could do the trick.

The campaign season this year on the GOP side has been very volatile. Perhaps a bit of that unstable dynamic is wafting over to the Democratic side. It's only naturally, but I wouldn't bet too heavily against Clinton at this point.

John McCain: Confident and Ready

John McCain's got a great interview today over at the Wall Street Journal:

John McCain sits across the table from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, fielding questions on everything from taxes to torture to terror. He's asked what surprised him the most about the behavior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with regard to Iraq. His answer--"their lack of patriotism"--is of the characteristically impolitic kind that often defines his personality. Over the course of a 75-minute conversation, it's on display time and again.

For a candidate who was mostly written off by the media only six months ago, the senior senator from Arizona seems remarkably confident of his primary chances.

Mr. McCain is 71. But the tired, sluggish, former front-runner you may have read about was nowhere in evidence when the senator came to the Journal's offices yesterday. In his place was a combative and--yes--straight-talking candidate with no qualms about rising to a challenge or speaking his mind. In short, he looks once again like the spry 63-year-old who nearly knocked off front-runner George W. Bush eight years ago.

When asked whether he would tag Hillary Clinton as well with a "lack of patriotism," Mr. McCain does dial it down a notch. "Maybe 'lack of patriotism' is too harsh," he allows. "'Putting political ambitions ahead of the national interest' may be a more subtle way" of putting it. He then adds, with a chuckle, "And we all know how subtle I am."

Just how subtle comes across in expanding on Mrs. Clinton's stance on the war and on the surge. "She had that very clever line--I don't know who wrote it for her--that you'd have to suspend disbelief in order to believe that the surge is working. Well, you'd have to suspend disbelief that it's not now." And then, as if confronting her in a presidential debate, he addresses the absent senator from New York directly: "Do you still stand by that statement, Senator Clinton? Do you still believe you'd have to suspend disbelief to believe that this surge is working?"

Mr. McCain is almost as scathing about his own party's behavior in power as he is about Congress's current leaders. Of the Republican congressional majority that was voted out in 2006, he says: "We let spending get out of control. . . . And we would have won the 2006 elections if we had restrained spending. Our base didn't desert us because of the war in Iraq. Our base deserted us because of the Bridge to Nowhere. I'll take you to a town hall tomorrow and I'll say 'Bridge to Nowhere' and everyone in that room will know what I'm talking about. That bridge is more famous than the Brooklyn Bridge."

That version of the events of November 2006 is not universally shared, even within the GOP, but it does serve Mr. McCain's interests pretty well. He has been one of the most prominent and unapologetic supporters of the war in Iraq, even though he at times disagreed with the administration about tactics and strategy.

And he voted against the Bush tax cuts--even though he admits that they helped the economy in the midst of a recession. "We all know that [they helped]. Without a doubt. Without the slightest doubt. Absolutely."

Even so, he defends his opposition to them on the grounds, he told us, that Congress couldn't get spending under control. "I opposed the tax cuts because there was no spending restraint. . . . If we'd enacted spending restraints, we'd be talking about more tax cuts today. And to the everlasting shame and embarrassment of the Republican Party and this administration, we went on a spending spree and we didn't pay for it. . . .

And every time I called over to the White House and said, look, you've got to veto these bills, the answer was, 'We'll lose the majority, we'll lose this election, we'll lose the speaker.' Well, you know what happened."

The words "I told you so" don't quite pass his lips, but his sense of vindication is plain enough.

As for the tax cuts themselves, he now pledges that he would fight to make them permanent. "I will not agree to any tax increase," he says. And then once more for emphasis: "I will not agree to any tax increase."

Read the whole thing.

As readers know, I'm pulling for McCain (see here and here). I have some trouble with a couple of his issue positions (note, though, that his experiential opposition to the use of torture is hard to rebut), although I see him coming around on key issues of importance to the GOP's conservative base.

Some Republican partisans will never forgive him, of course, but the Arizona Senator is looking more competitive in New Hampshire, and a win there might create a bandwagon effect in later contests.

**********

UPDATE: Fred Barnes over at the Weekly Standard's got a new piece on McCain's rebound, "McCain's Last Stand":

McCain sneers at the importance of Iowa, whose caucuses on January 3 are the first contest in the Republican presidential race. "If I don't finish in the top 50 in Iowa, I'll still stay in the race," he told reporters in South Carolina last week. In Iowa the next day, McCain went out of his way in a televised debate to denounce the federal subsidy for ethanol, a popular program in the state.
So the old McCain is back, the flippant, contrarian candidate who came close to defeating George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000. And amazingly enough, after his campaign to be nominee in 2008 all but collapsed this summer, McCain is experiencing a rebirth. He now has a chance--an outside chance, at least--of winning the Republican nomination.

Things large and small in the campaign have been moving McCain's way. The war in Iraq has turned sharply toward victory now that President Bush has adopted the strategy McCain had been recommending for several years. This is McCain's best issue and now a distinct plus for his campaign. And the immigration issue, a poisonous one for McCain, has become less intense since his immigrant-friendly approach lost in the Senate last summer....

McCain is concentrating his campaign on New Hampshire, where "he's got to win," according to former senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who traveled with McCain last week. If Romney loses there, "he's out of the race," Gramm says. Then, adds McCain adviser Charles Black, McCain will win in Michigan and South Carolina and take command of the race.

"Deep in their hearts," Gramm says, "Republican primary voters know John McCain is the only great man running for president." Maybe, but McCain doesn't make it easy for them to vote for him.

To the delight of Republicans, he passionately defends the war in Iraq, favors restraining entitlements, and calls for cuts in government spending and elimination of earmarks. But he insists on stressing issues like global warming and strict limits on interrogation of terrorists, which are anathema to many Republicans. He regularly refers to illegal immigrants as "God's children," another irritant for some. And in farm state Iowa McCain declared he would "eliminate subsidies on ethanol and other agricultural products."

It's all part of the McCain package that's far more conservative than not and often unpredictable. In Inman [South Carolina], a man gave McCain a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, saying he'd done the same on an aircraft carrier off Vietnam decades ago.

There was no reason for McCain to comment on this, yet he did. He held up the pack and said there was good news and bad news. "I've not had a cigarette in 28 years," he said. "That's the good news. The bad news is I still want a cigarette." The best news for McCain, though, is that he once again has a shot at the Republican nomination.

I'm pulling for him!

The Wide Open GOP Nomination Race

Time has an interesting article this week on the turbulent Republican presidential nomination process. The frontrunner so far? None of the above! Here's a snippet:

Watching the G.O.P. search for a nominee has been a little like going to dinner at one of those mock medieval-jousting shows, where knight after knight appears in shining armor, only to be knocked rudely off his horse and into the dirt. Early White House favorites George Allen and Bill Frist quickly fell by the wayside in 2006. John McCain — too much of a maverick to ever be a G.O.P. favorite, and yet a year ago the presumptive front-runner — crash-landed his campaign this summer and is only now showing signs of an unlikely resurrection. His friend Fred Thompson materialized in midsummer to catch McCain's crown, but he fizzled fast. Romney became the party's default darling, spending his way to the top of several polls. But now he too has taken hits for being slippery, and what counts as momentum has passed to Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher from, of all places, Hope, Ark. The way the recurring nightmare has been going, Huckabee is likely to be unhorsed right about ... now.

Even Giuliani, the national front-runner — a title that normally means something in a G.O.P. race but this year is the equivalent of "honorary chairman" — is slumping in polls. Republicans have no experience with chaos like this, except in history books. "It is without a doubt," says G.O.P. strategist Ralph Reed, "the most unpredictable roller-coaster ride we've seen in a Republican primary since the rise of the primary in the 1960s." Party-history buff Newt Gingrich went further: he called the G.O.P. contest the most wide-open race the party has held since 1940 — the year Wendell Willkie needed six ballots to capture the nomination before losing to F.D.R. in a third-term landslide.

It's improbable that someone named George Bush, the most visible beneficiary of the G.O.P.'s longtime bias toward primogeniture, would be responsible for bringing its era to a halt. But he is chiefly to blame for leaving the party of his father and grandfather without a healthy male heir. Bush tapped Dick Cheney seven years ago to be his Veep in part because he did not want a Vice President whose loyalties were divided between the Oval Office and the Des Moines Register. Cheney ran once before and could have jumped in again (he will be only 67 in January) had things gone differently. But Cheney is even less popular than Bush, whose ratings move in a narrow band between the high 20s and mid-30s and have been dragging down fellow Republicans. Even if the war in Iraq continues to simmer down or the economy firms, Republicans aren't likely to get much credit.

The disarray can't be blamed on Bush entirely; he may even deserve credit for postponing it. Some students of the G.O.P. have argued that the revolution that brought the party to power in Congress in 1994 was pretty much a spent force by 2000. Under this theory, Republicans should have lost that election but survived thanks to Bush's qualities, the butterfly ballot and five Supreme Court Justices. Then 9/11 happened, which enabled Bush to win reelection, despite the fact that the G.O.P.'s sell-by date had long since passed. The past seven years, in this view, were an anomaly that postponed the reckoning and made the G.O.P. crash even more severe.

Still, it is hard to overestimate the moral and intellectual power outage that now darkens the G.O.P.. Long out of step with a majority of voters on such secondary issues as outlawing abortion and narrowing stem-cell research, Republicans have more recently managed to get themselves on the wrong side of popular trends on what were once old reliables: foreign policy, economics, energy, even health care. Iraq is still somewhat taboo in Republican debates, so fearful are the candidates that the situation in Baghdad might again deteriorate. Thanks to Katrina and several war-contracting scandals, the party has squandered its bragging rights on running a more efficient government. "We've lost, clearly, some of the moral high ground on the larger issues of taxes and spending," says South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Perhaps, but I wouldn't put too much stock into the notion that the GOP is already sunk for 2008 - the notion of GOP disarray is overblown.

The lack of a clear frontrunner has forced the party to think about its core identity: What will a post-Bush conservatism look like? Small-government ideology? A Reaganite foreign policy?

Who knows, although it's fair to say that Republicans will solidly unite behind the eventual nominee, and conservative priorities on immigration, social issues, and taxes will form key planks of the eventual GOP party platform.

It's going to be a great year. Republican candidates have fared well in recent elections, with Bobby Jinal winning the governorship of Lousiana, and two GOP candidates winning special elections to Congress just this week.

Continued progress in Iraq - and the Democratic Party's own policy blunders - will work to the GOP's advantage in 2008.

The Dark Side of Microlending

Business Week has a fascinating story on the dark underbelly of microlending, the antipoverty strategy used in Third World countries to provide small loans to the poor, promoting economic improvement.

It turns out that the market for poor lending has skyrocketed into a hugely profitable business for banking interests. More troubling is how microlending often results in more hardship for the poor, when usurious lending practices send people deeper to poverty.

Business Week's article focuses on microlending in Mexico. It's a fascinating story:

The transactions are so minuscule they hardly seem worth the bother. The average loan amounts to $257. But for Banco Azteca, a swiftly growing bank affiliated with Latin America's largest household retailer, the small sums represent a torrent of revenue that has caught even its founders by surprise. For three decades, micro-lending was seen as a tool of nonprofit economic development. Now poor people are turning into one of the world's least likely sources of untapped profit, primarily because they will pay interest rates most Americans would consider outrageous, if not usurious.

With no legal limits on interest levels and little government oversight, for-profit banks in Mexico impose annual interest rates on poor borrowers that typically range from 50% to 120%. That compares with a worldwide average of 31% among nonprofit micro-lending institutions, and the 22% to 29% that Americans with bad credit histories incur on credit-card debt. Azteca's business model succeeds not only because it can charge credit-starved clients almost whatever it wants. Equally important is that low-income Mexicans anxious about maintaining their reputation tend to pay back what they owe, regardless of the hardship. Those who slip behind receive frequent visits from motorcycle-riding collection agents. Default rates are infinitesimal. "We lend to them as much as they can borrow," says Azteca Vice-Chairman Luis Niño de Rivera, "and they can borrow as much as they can pay"....

The transactions are so minuscule they hardly seem worth the bother. The average loan amounts to $257. But for Banco Azteca, a swiftly growing bank affiliated with Latin America's largest household retailer, the small sums represent a torrent of revenue that has caught even its founders by surprise. For three decades, micro-lending was seen as a tool of nonprofit economic development. Now poor people are turning into one of the world's least likely sources of untapped profit, primarily because they will pay interest rates most Americans would consider outrageous, if not usurious.

Pawnshops and loan sharks, whose interest rates of up to 300% have plagued generations of Mexicans, now face rivals offering terms that are less harsh. But along the road to previously unavailable financing, some Mexicans are stumbling badly.

The Arana family is but a blip on one of the wide screens at Azteca's operations center. Beneath the digital glimmer lies a story of striving. Adrián Arana Sánchez, his wife, Francisca, and their extended family take whatever work they can find, adding a few pesos here and there. Last July, Adrián lost an $80-a-week job delivering soft drinks to stores in gritty, exhaust-choked San Martín Texmelucan, a city of 143,000 two hours southeast of Mexico City. He now brings home half that amount peddling vegetables door to door and making plaster-cast statuettes of Jesus. Francisca sells crunchy slices of jicama root outside an elementary school. With four children, two grandchildren, and a son-in-law, they live in a four-room cinderblock house in the shadow of snow-capped volcanoes once revered by the Aztecs.

Although indigent by U.S. or Western European standards, the Aranas see themselves as aspiring consumers and even as entrepreneurs in a society that makes all manner of goods and services available for what seem like manageable weekly payments. Banco Azteca plays a central role in that emerging credit economy. Started five years ago, it operates from the nearly 800 locations of its parent, Grupo Elektra, Latin America's largest electronics and home appliance chain. Elektra/Azteca has the sort of ubiquitous presence that Wal-Mart enjoys in the U.S.

Read the whole thing.

Muhammad Yunis, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his program of providing microcredit to millions in Bangladesh, is a hero among global activists and developmental economists (and interestingly, Yunis turned out to be no saint, see here and here).

Certainly market forces should be maximized to help lift the global poor out of poverty. But it's interesting to know that the bloom is off the rose a bit on microcredit.

Gettin' Out of the 'Hood

I've noted on several occassions - in my posts on black politics - that it's vital for African-Americans to escape the crime, violence, poverty, and social disorganization of the inner-cities.

The crisis of the black community is a difficult topic to discuss, especially when so much of the African-American community continues to cling to the 1960s-era agenda of civil rights activism based on the ideology of oppression.

Thus Breea Willingham's brief essay today at USA Today is like a powerful gust of fresh air. Here's her commentary, in its entirety:

My younger brother, Josh, had plans earlier this year to join the Army. He had vowed to be a better father to his newborn son than his father was to him. The military, he figured, was his best option.

Fearing Josh would be sent straight to the front lines in Iraq, my mother wasn't happy about his decision. His response: I'd rather die fighting a war in Iraq than on the streets of Philadelphia.

I understood and respected Josh's commitment to his son. I was proud of him. Yet he was stabbed during a dispute before he could make it to basic training, ending any Army career. He survived, but he's still fighting a common battle: that of a young black man trying to find a way out of "the hood." I couldn't help but think of my brother when I heard about the death of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor. Though they lived very different lives, my brother's struggles echo that of Taylor, who left an 18-month-old child behind.

My brother has been in and out of jail for non-violent infractions. He's studying to be a barber and plans to move to Atlanta. I hope he gets out in time because I worry that the streets, or prisons, will take another brother from me. My older brother, Rodney, is already serving a life sentence. I want Josh's son to one day be able to look up to a successful father, not see one behind bars.

People often ask me how I managed to get out of the neighborhood and not follow a similar destructive path. I don't really know. My brothers and I grew up in the same house, raised by the same mother. With little money, we all had temptations to go down the wrong path. I think my brothers, like many black people, fall into a self-defeatist mode and believe all they can be is a victim. The hopelessness and despair in the black community are ever present in the media, so is it any wonder so many young black men feel they can't get out? I know Josh wants a better life. But he, like many black men, feels stuck.

And me, I feel trapped between two worlds. I don't fit in at home anymore because I'm seen as "changed." In the small rural town where I now live, I don't quite fit in, always struggling with my own identity crises.

I suppose I should wear my "getting out" badge with honor, but how can I when so many other black women and men are left behind? Or when my family saw my pursuit of a career as abandonment of them?

These are the hurdles — some physical, many emotional — that many young black men and women face every day in inner cities, but all hope is not lost. There is still time for them — Josh included — to get out.

That's what it's going to take.

Willingham's brother was almost there, before he was nearly killed. How many more young blacks are struck down before they have a chance to realize their dreams of opportunity and upward mobility by gettin' out of the 'hood?

It's disturbing that Willingham herself feels shame for successully moving up and out.

Share this story with people when they want to tell you "it's all institutional racism."

See more on black politics, here, here, here, and here.

More Public Optimism on Iraq War

This morning's Washington Post reports new poll findings on the rebound in public support on Iraq:

A year after approval of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq dipped to an all-time low, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds discontent toward the war easing slightly, with Republicans and independents significantly more positive about the situation than they were 12 months ago.

Baseline judgments about the war are unchanged -- six in 10 in the poll said the war is not worth fighting -- but the public is somewhat more upbeat about progress in Iraq. Optimism about the year ahead is also higher than it was a year ago.

Although a majority say the United States is not making significant gains toward restoring civil order in Iraq, the public's views are more positive than at this time last year. About four in 10 say the United States is making progress, an increase of 10 percentage points over last year.

Looking ahead to the new year, the public is somewhat more hopeful about the situation in Iraq. Forty-six percent said they are optimistic about the situation in Iraq in 2008, six points higher than in December 2006.

The improved public assessment comes as the rate of U.S. casualties and the violence in general in Iraq have declined. The war has also recently been overshadowed by other issues on the presidential campaign trail.

Movement in public assessment on the war is largely driven by a more positive outlook among Republicans.

Nearly eight in 10 Republicans, 77 percent, said the United States is improving the security situation in Iraq, up from 54 percent a year ago. Three-quarters of Republicans are optimistic about the year ahead in Iraq; 12 months ago, barely more than half felt that way.

A majority of independents continue to see a lack of progress, but the percentage seeing significant gains is up 14 points, to 42 percent. At the same time, independents are about as pessimistic as they were. Democrats remain overwhelmingly negative about the situation on the ground now and in the year ahead.

Democrats are still largely disapproving of the decision to go to war, with 85 percent saying that, given the costs and benefits to the United States, the war is not worth fighting. More than six in 10 independents agree, whereas three-quarters of Republicans call the war worth the effort. These numbers have shifted only marginally, as 37 percent of all Americans call the war worth fighting, nearly identical to the percentage saying so in December 2006.

This is interesting: It's a partisan war.

The improvement we see is mostly from Republicans who were war-weary, but are now pleased with the progress being made. The poll finds a 14 percent improvement among independents on the prospect of making significant gains, while Democrats appear as retreatist as ever.

Continued improvement will help the GOP next fall, and most importantly, the Iraqi people.

See also my earlier posts on the Iraq rebound in public opinion, here and here.